Inspiration for Chrome Gopher

Problems of Practice that Inspired Chrome Gopher

Schools are making considerable investments in fleets of domain-managed Chrome OS devices, and IT admins seeking to get the greatest value from their Chromebook investment will often need to:

Manage device and user policies at the organizational unit level. For example -- the need to convert instructional devices into kiosk mode for testing, and back again.

Maintain accurate metadata in the Google Chrome management console, including annotated user, device location, asset ID, and notes fields. It is frequently the case that data from 3rd party asset management or barcoding systems needs to be imported into in the Chrome Management Console so they can be used in reporting on device usage data.

Monitor device usage to identify under-utilization, re-allocate devices, or provide targeted supports where needed. For example, stale last sync times or outdated Chrome OS versions can be great proxies for dormant devices.

Respond to incidentsof damage or vandalism by analyzing device usage history, or user activity across devices.

Assess Chrome OS update status on devices across the domain.

The challenge with many of these essential activities above is that, while most of them can be accomplished manually in the Chrome device management console, these tasks cannot be easily accomplished in bulk, at the scale of thousands of devices.

In addition, reporting on a single user’s activity across devices is not currently possible in the Chrome device management console.

The Chrome Gopher Solution

Chrome Gopher is an Add-on for Google Sheets that allows for Chrome device data to be imported, filtered, analyzed, and bulk-updated right from the sidebar of a Google Sheet.

Examples of the kinds of activities that you can perform with Chrome Gopher:

Isolate a group of devices by enrollment time, annotated location, or another field and bulk-move them into an organizational unit.

Populate annotated user, location, notes, or asset ID for devices from a 3rd party export and bulk update the Chrome console from the data in the Sheet.